


set in stone

by Beatingheartanthem



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Canon - Manga, Canon Universe, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, One Shot, canonverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 11:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatingheartanthem/pseuds/Beatingheartanthem
Summary: Eren is jostled around by time, experiencing and re-experiencing different moments with Mikasa. Some choices made are the same. Some choices made are different. He knows he's going to die, but he'd like a moment of peace before he does. ***MANGA SPOILERS
Relationships: Mikasa Ackerman/Eren Yeager
Comments: 16
Kudos: 108





	set in stone

If I die, I can’t even remember you—

Mikasa Ackerman

: What am I to you?

Mikasa could only stare at Eren, her face uplifted in the dark. The capillaries in her cheeks throbbed. Eren waited. He had the look of a man hanging from a cliff by his fingertips.

Speech was almost finished. Eren saw Mikasa’s tongue. Each second, he hung from the cliff by the edge of his fingers. Mikasa closed her mouth, seeing him hanging with all he had, never pressing her to speak, never rushing.

Mikasa opened her mouth again.

Eren waited.

The word voided again.

Then Mikasa came to Eren, softened, in a way he knew she’d never come to him before. He doubted what it meant. Her face was raised. Silence imbued the night with a sense that something was about to happen. Eren wouldn’t know what it meant until much later.

Mikasa’s hands reached up, as if to catch him from the cliff.

They were interrupted. Eren turned. A man stood in front of them. He wore a religious headpiece. Slowly Mikasa lowered her hands.

This part, as it went, was all the same.

They were all together. Celebration took up the night. Less time in the sum of all-time, them laughing in it, enjoying their friendship and togetherness against the urgent oncoming. Each second was a second lost, but each second was a second spent with each other. And if they were going to die, these were the seconds that outmatched any cost. They could die content, having been with each other on a good night, with good weather, drinking and laughing together under the stars in an internment camp. 

When Mikasa raised another cup, Eren turned his head. He spoke into her ear. “Slowly,” he said.

It tickled the microscopic hair lining the canal.

“You’ll fall asleep.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

Glasses were upended. Bottles were emptied. Bodies thawed and turned to slosh. A little while later, Jean and Connie went to get more booze. Everyone refilled their cups, beginning all over again. They slugged it down and warmed and reveled.

“Mikasa.” Eren leaned against her and put his voice to her hearing. “Don’t fall asleep.”

She turned her head and put her lips to his ear. “I won’t,” she whispered. She breathed on him. It tickled those microscopic hairs lining the inner ear. Eren shuddered.

They drank even more. They laughed even more. Celebration climbed to a peak. The moon hung at a plumb vertical in the night sky. All the time in the world had reduced by an hour or two.

“Please don’t fall asleep,” Eren said. This time he didn’t turn his face. His voice was strained and urgent. Mikasa smiled as the tent spun, and Eren spun, and all her friends blended and tangled up together, smiling, happy because all things had become happy things, dizzying and wonderful.

Mikasa lied down and closed her eyes, resting them for a second. Eren’s voice, she heard, was soft now. The other voices, too, were soft. Subaquatic people speaking through deep oceanic suds. Everything watered over with a rising sea, darkening. Harder to hear. Harder to open her eyes: _Please don’t fall asleep_ . . . ., and then all the black depths of the darkest darknesses folded in on her, and she drowned.

No more than a minute passed before Mikasa’s eyes came open again. The real world emerged and surfaced. Now the tent was silent and dim with no sign of movement anywhere. A crowd of hot slack bodies was sprawled over the ground as though they’d all been slaughtered in the night.

With a leg pulled up, Eren sat, gazing out the tent. Mikasa lifted from the floor and Eren turned his head across his shoulder. It was too dark to see his face. Behind him, the moon shined.

“You’re awake,” he said. His voice was soft like she remembered from a dream. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right.”

“Drink this.” Eren handed Mikasa a cup of something hot. She drank. Hot coffee sat at the top of her gut. Eren rose. His palms hissed down his vest and coat. “Will you come along with me? I know it’s risky but—”

“To where?”

“To nowhere. I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I only wanted to see more of the outside world with you,” and reached down. Mikasa took his hand. Once she was pulled to her feet, Eren didn’t release her hand right away. “I thought you’d sleep all night.” He was whispering still, with everyone sleeping. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

Mikasa felt she hadn’t fully waken yet. The coffee sat, solid, at the top of her gut, not soaking through her, not waking her. It was all a dream.

Mikasa jammed her hat on. Eren led her out of the tent, bareheaded. On sand, their footsteps whispered. Individual granules glittered. Their shadows grew out of their shapes, swooping over twinkling sand-wrinkles and ridges. The hills looked like an ocean, in perpetual pause. Everything was a dream.

As they walked in the breezeless night, their feet left imprints, tracking behind them. The whispering footsteps gathered into pavement clacks. They continued down a paved road. Eren was still holding her hand. Almost afraid to move, she watched their hands, knowing Eren didn’t know about their locked grasps.

As their hands swung and flicked in and out of the moonlight, she began to realize Eren knew about their locked grasps and was holding her by the hand, knowing that’s what he was doing. The life sucked up and out of Mikasa’s fingers. Eren looked at her, feeling the emptying of her hand. He slowed. She slowed.

“Do you want to let go?” he said.

She thought, hesitant, then pushed the life back into her fingers. They began walking again. Their hands swung again. In and out of the moonlight.

In a faintly lit plaza, there were men sawing and soothing music out of instruments. People danced in circles under the moon, like pearls spinning and dangling on a woman’s necklaced throat. Eren and Mikasa approached the mysterious activity, wondering at it together. A foreign woman flew to them, clasping her hands to her chest like a prayer. She appreciated Eren and Mikasa, nodding, humming delightedly, marveling at their young perfect togetherness.

Then she put a hand on Eren’s back, a hand on Mikasa’s back: “Man takes woman,” she said and pushed Eren and pushed Mikasa until they stood face to face. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Take. You take,” and she pressed Eren, insisting. 

Eren placed a caress on the small of Mikasa’s back. She folded her hand into his. Then they spun like the others. Tapping into a shared collective reservoir of histories, Eren knew the movements, connected to minds and intelligences that weren’t his own. Mikasa didn’t know the movements, but as Eren moved, she watched him and learned from him and assimilated to him, doing anything she never knew the instant she saw it for the first time. They danced like porcelain automatons and swung into a crescendo. They swooped back down, reaching the end.

The musicians held and resonated a final note. It rose. It fell. The dancing ceased. The dancers applauded, grateful for the musicians. The musicians smiled, waving in large gestures, grateful for the dancers. The pairs of men and women held onto each other and vanished into the night like phantoms that would re-materialize, out of nowhere, at the drag of a bow, coming alive at the sound of music.

Into the dark secretive town, Eren and Mikasa walked, holding onto each other, as the other pairs had, vanishing like smoke. Mikasa listened to their footfalls on the street. The stars had disappeared. She let Eren take them somewhere. He knew where they were going, not stopping to look or entertain curiosities. There was no curiosity, his eyes trained forward, growing tighter and harder. They reached a new street. Murmurs swarmed around them like swirls of vague dust. Women meandered along the sidewalks, back and forth, back and forth. Men with money took out their wallets and the women smiled lusciously and whispered the men inside clandestine buildings and rooms. Pink curtains flapped in windows. Perfume laid in pink seductive clouds. Eyes glinted and slid in skulls to follow after Mikasa as she moved down the street.

“Stay close,” Eren said, and brought her into his side.

He turned. A dark building with dark teethy windows rose in front of them. Eren opened the door. Inside, it was eerie and hushed and infested with whispers, and criminal. Eren walked in with his arm around Mikasa. Him leading, they went to a man standing at a desk. A single hanging lamp poured a cone of light over his wax-head. Eren lifted one finger and laid down cash. The wax-headed man procured them a key. Eren reached for it. Before he could take it, the man snatched it back.

“Blood doesn’t wash out of the mattresses. Dispose of any—” the man put flat vacant eyes on Mikasa, “leftovers.”

“Yes.”

The man gave Eren the key. They went down a dim hall congested with smutty shadows. Their footfalls fell mute on carpet. Voices could be heard behind lines of doors. Men’s unintelligible voices tangled in women’s unintelligible sighs. Mikasa’s heart rate picked up.

“What did that man mean?” she said. She knew what that man had meant.

“I’m sorry,” Eren said. “This place is far from ideal.”

When they reached the hotel room, Eren walked around and, inspecting the bed and the bathroom, he made sure the room would do as it was meant to do. And, yes, it would do just that. Then, without any warning, he seized Mikasa by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead. When he moved away, she covered the warm gentle-spot with her hands, feeling at it, like an abashed little girl.

“Huh?”

“If you want to shower first,” he said.

“ . . . ”

“We only have an hour. It’s all I could afford.”

Mikasa’s eyes went wide. Blood seeped and darkened her face and she stared, appearing quite nervous in that instant. Eren took a step back. Discouraged, he turned his eyes away.

“I see,” she said. She brushed hair behind her ear in that restless sweep of feminine nerves and self-consciousness. The almost-black eyes grew darker and deeper. “All right, then. I suppose I’ll go first.”

Silently Eren began undoing the vest buttons and continued to do as he intended to do from the beginning. Mikasa took off her hat. Then she set it on the bed. She folded her coat and slipped off her shoes. He thumbed the buttons of his shirt. This all went on silence. They didn’t even look at each other, undressing. Then she went on her bare feet into the bathroom. The door quietly shut.

Eren released all the air in his lungs at once. He put his hand on his head, gritting his teeth in a miserable pain. _How can I compress a whole lifetime and force it into a single hour?_ he thought. To coax and to soothe, to encourage and be encouraged, to love and to be loved and to kiss and to hold and to go slow and to treasure and relish and all the other things— in one hour.

It was impossible.

He undid his belt and took off his trousers and removed every article of clothing, setting it neatly on the bed, emptied. In the mirror, he saw himself and examined what he saw and was deeply disappointed that all things in himself were deeply disappointing. 

He went into the bathroom. 

Heat came at him. Steam blinded him. He found the glass shower door and, taking the handle in his fingers, he breathed and resolved and entered.

Under the spout, Mikasa glanced over her shoulder. Then she turned from him and covered her body with her hands, making herself a beautiful agony. Eren turned his back. He was a bundle of contradictions. He wanted to give and he wanted to take. He wanted to stay forever, he wanted to run away. Then he saw her arms come around him and wrap his chest and she pulled him in from behind. Resting her face on the nape of his neck, she held him and cradled him with her body. Her heart hammered a pulse between his shoulder blades.

“You had a plan all along,” she said. “Why?”

“I guess I—selfishly wanted a moment of peace before it’s too late.”

Eren took her hands, turning, and placed them on his chest and held her palms against his skin, and they felt his chest together until he let his hands fall away. Hers stayed, feeling him. He watched her look at him and wonder at him, and her fingers touched him gently and felt his skin in a frictionless glide. He melted into her hands, becoming soft and gentle, Mikasa making him soft and gentle.

Then Eren took her by the chin and, touching at no other point, he dragged her face to his. After a moment, she wound her arms around his neck. No longer needing to hold her by the chin, Eren let go and cupped her throat and felt the throb and the weight of hard hot blood surging in her body, making her breathe faster and grow weaker and raise the life in them both. He let his hand drop from her neck. Tentatively, he felt her the way she’d felt him.

Then she came away and he could see her again, and she looked up at him with those almost-black permeating eyes. She covered his hand with hers and firmed his touch, and in a reversal of before, this time they touched her, together.

They suffered, dying, like fish out of water.

Her eyes stained over with a fading blind look and she swayed into a soft weakness, all long legs and muscle and wet skin. He held her thighs open, even as she shook and fought his grip. Then, all at once, she relaxed. She caught her breath. He crawled on top of her.

“Wait,” she said, and he watched the fast, shallow breath move her chest. She put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him. “Please. Give me a moment.” Then she took her hand off his shoulder and put it on her head, feeling at a sudden splitting headache.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only thought about what I wanted without considering your feelings. This was never going to work. There’s not enough time. There’s never enough time.” His eyes changed suddenly—

“What?” She took his face in her hands and searched. His irises were a different color. They beamed, spinning, omnipotent, all-powerful, terrible.

“Eren, that’s—”

Time jumped. It left this reality like a dying respiration. The life went out of it and the infinitesimal trickle of energy that carried this particular variation of history, thundering down into a timeless desert where all stories began, went utterly dark. But it was only one out of an infinity and therefore it meant nothing.

Somewhere across time, in the jumble of Is and Was and Will Be, a mother reprimanded a little boy again.

“Don’t you want to protect Mikasa?” the woman was saying, is saying, had already said, a thousand years ago. “You need to grow up strong and be a man. Stop causing Mikasa so much trouble.”

The reverted-Eren was furious with his mother for reminding him that he was furious with himself, powerless and sick with inferiority, he glared at his mother, he wanted to scream at her, he wanted to scream at the world for making him so small and insignificant; he wanted to scream at history and Time for making him small and insignificant, and able to die. Why? Why even let him be born if he was going to die? He was only a child. He didn’t know. He wouldn’t know for another few months, a few weeks, and then it would be a memory, and all he could do was remember.

War was always going on—and war was still going on as it had since the dawn of time, people fighting and dying and returning to fight and die and return. It was war all over again when Mikasa met Eren’s eyes in Liberio, with her furnished for war, a war-machine, standing over him, with all the war around her.

Nothing of the history Eren knew had happened anywhere in all of time.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Mikasa’s eyes welled with the sadness of something she didn’t yet know. “You even killed _children_.”

Women and children washed the streets with their blood, as they had ten years ago, as they had one hundred years ago, a thousand years ago; washing the streets with their blood as they would continue to, bleeding into the earth for no reason at all because history was a monster, it bowed to the will of nobody, though it was humans who ate up time and then digested and defecated history and then ate it up again, eating and defecating, and dying, until they all became sick to the marrow, mutated, and the world would never be cured of this sickness because the sickness had infected their genes, their very material, and the children would inherit mutated genes, fulfilling the cycles because time was never a line, never beginning and end. Time was a circle going around and around senselessly, forever. 

Mikasa saw in Eren’s eyes how he’d already let go. She’d never seen him do it. But he had already let go and smashed into the rocks at the bottom, and now he was raw with his own death, still grieving, bereaved of himself, looking at her. Left with nothing. Nothing at all.

This was all the same as it always had been.

“It isn’t over yet, Mikasa,” he said. And they both watched as the War Hammer grew from the ground, with its special ability of creation and concealment. Mikasa vibrated, ready, her muscles already locked in. Her infallible muscles sprang on her bones, gliding like a machine, and she flew him to safety.

Time jumped.

Three good friends sat at a table and the war was still going on, somewhere, arriving sometime soon to bleed over the oceans, across the world, and Eren was now a strong and empty long-dead man, his voice like a hollow that had no end, down, down, and the three good friends looked across the table, not knowing the strangers sitting across from them.

 _Mikasa_ , Eren said. He was a dead man who, without even flinching, could gut a woman from her pelvic bone to her breastbone with his words alone, and wrench the tears from her eyes, spurting them out of her ducts like blood:

_I’ve always hated you._

Mikasa hemorrhaged but it was not blood. Her eyes were like two bloody knife gashes. And he watched the water like blood run down her face. And he was deader than death itself.

Time jumped.

Mikasa stared, dry-eyed, out the jail cell, with no more tears. Only the blood pumping and the veins flooding. The war that was always going on had, at last, arrived and the battle ensued overhead, giant vessels of god-power fighting with man-fists, and they sat inside the underground prison, listening to it. _Eren_. Mikasa heard Eren’s titan roar, it trembled the earth. Her muscles rippled and vibrated on her bones, throbbing with the instinct, the unshakeable drive. Like a machine whirring with no off-switch, smoking and grinding, and heating. _If we don’t fight, we can’t—_

Why am I born only to die?

Men were the most dangerous when they’d already let go, when they’d already died and were living as dead men did, feeling nothing of anything that went on in the world. Eren stood in front of the thundering streams of infinite memories and time that flowed up from beneath the sands of the desert and thundered into the sky splitting endlessly into endless branches, into infinite realities, into the sum of all realities, time pumped forward and backward down the arteries of an ultradimensional other-world, through the roots that fed the universe with molecules and enzymes that were broken down and metabolized, bringing about what we understood as the present.

Eren stared into the streams of pathways and time. Infinitesimal shards floated like illusions, him watching it all, watching everything. Time breaking and healing and breaking. He saw Mikasa a thousand times in a thousand pieces over a thousand years.

Was it only a dream?

Eren stuck his hand into the light and seized a shard from the lightning and thunder. On it, moving, a memory played of a little girl and a little boy, and a scarf. Eren watched and felt sad and soft all over and the shard dissolved into bright dust that lifted from his hands to melt again into the thunder and lightning.

 _Don’t you want to protect Mikasa?_ he heard his mother say. _If you want to save Mikasa,_ he heard Kruger say. _If you want to save Mikasa,_ he heard his father say. They were all inside his head at once, a hundred times over, dividing him into hundredths, and he gripped his brain, shoving the hundred slabs together into a singular cerebral matter.

 _If I want to save Mikasa and Armin and everyone else_ , he said to himself, holding his brain together, _this is the only way. For them to live long lives, as long as history and Time will allow._

He fell through space and entered the past again.

“What am I to you?” he said.

Again, the moon shined and the sand glittered, and Mikasa stared and the capillaries in her face opened, flushing her cheeks into a lovely pink shock. She couldn’t speak. Eren reached his arms open and took her into them.

“You don’t have to answer right now,” he said. “You never have to answer if you don’t want to. I’ll wait as long as you need until you’re ready.”

Then he pulled her head to his chest and held her to his heartbeat and she listened to it beating, wrapping herself around it.

“Come find me under that tree and wake me up,” he said. “For the rest of our lives, again and again, forever, come find me.”

She clutched the back of his coat.

Then he was holding nothing at all. He opened his empty arms. His eyes went around, looking for something precious he’d lost. He walked, looking. Around him lay an unfathomable nothing. For days, he walked, slowly, in an empty darkness with enough sourceless light to see and travel by, moving one foot in front of the other, moving, walking, one foot then the other. Then it was years. Years had passed, him still looking, his shoes beaten down flat, still looking for what he’d lost.

Suddenly his shoes hit wet tile. He looked ahead. He stopped. On a tiled bathroom floor, Mikasa sat, stripped to nothing but skin, dripping shower-water, her back to him, head bent, body drawn into a fetal position, as if she’d been made small, inside a liquid float, wrapped in an invisible womb. The rib bones spread out from her rutted spinal cord like a cage of wings and folded around her in perfect bone-arches. 

“Does it give you peace to take away my peace?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Even long after you’re gone, if I’m the one who’s to free you, I’ll never have any peace left for myself.”

“You have the choice to free me or not to. Whether it’s your peace or mine, you’ll do what you think is right.”

“I can’t free you, Eren. I’m sorry.”

He went to her and lowered to a crouch. Her short black hair had fallen all over her face. “You can do it,” he said, “because you’re strong. You’ll save the world, after all.”

“The walls of my heart are small. There is only enough room to care about you, and Armin, and the others. I have always been this way.”

“In the beginning, they were small. But the moment you laid eyes on the outside world, those walls of yours fell.” He put a hand to her cheek, turning her face up, the hair falling back and away. He pulled her eyes to his. “Mikasa, you are free.”

She reached to wrap her arms around him, eyes longing and sad, “Since that day, I only ever wanted for you to live,” and he tilted forward, off his heels, letting himself collapse into her strong open arms, but, feeling nothing at all, he sank right through, dropping into the lonely void of timeless black. 

Eren dissolved back into the first history and the earth was scorched and crushed under the miles on miles of Colossal Titan footfalls, and the war was everywhere, the world soaked in fire, and he was the devil to be stopped, and they had tried, they had almost succeeded, but he was not stopped. The smoke flushed away and it was him and a hundred craters of failed crusades, and him unscathed, and the earth torn up, ripped through, and he stood, like a god, cheating death again, for the tenth time, the twentieth. Immortal. He was not immortal. It was not the titan power that saved him, once again. As when he was only a boy, once again, he had caused her trouble. He was just a boy, never growing up.

This was all the same as it had always been since the beginning.

“ _Stop_ ,” he said, and his voice washed over the earth, in a cosmic tide.

War stopped. Time stopped. She didn’t stop.

Eren walked out from under the flush of smoke. Her body still jerked on the ground, hemorrhaging. It was blood this time. Slowly, Eren went to Mikasa, talking, him long dead on the inside and empty, not feeling pain. Or, perhaps, feeling it always.

“This was your choice? After everything I’ve done, you want to make this battlefield your grave?” His voice shook the ground. Mikasa’s body convulsed, blood shrieking and sobbing from open wounds. _You were always a hero_ , he thought. _I knew that. You’re not like me, you’re not like Historia, you’re not like Floch. I always knew the kind of person you were. And still—_ “You were supposed to end this all and live on.” The ground broke under his feet. His voice and their voices terrified and trembled the earth. “Why couldn’t you just hate me like a normal person and set me free from this burden?” It was not the earth trembling. He was the one shaking and breaking.

He went to one knee. Then he went to both knees. He was soaked to his shins in blood. Mikasa died in red throbs and, until the end, her muscles never ceased vibrating, fighting, because that is what they were supposed to do for an eternity. “I know this world is cruel, Eren.” Her eyes stared at the open sky, searching. He moved into their view and her dying eyes found him. “But even now, it’s also very beautiful,” she said. “Tell me, is it true that you’ve always hated me?”

Then her eyes emptied on his eyes and lost their sight like a candle burning out. Her muscles diminished and sank. Her body sighed and went limp.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . You didn’t hear my answer. Mikasa?”

Eren laid his ear on her chest. He listened. Silence and stillness filled the empty cavity.

Eren took his ear away and held her. She was slack body matter, nothing inside. Nothing.

He remembered what the half-brother Zeke had said: _Before saving everyone else, I only want to save you_. Yes, Eren too. “Before saving Paradis,” he said, “I only wanted to save you.” He stared at Mikasa and waited for her to hear him.

She heard nothing because she was dead. Her eyes stared pointlessly in that lonely fear of deterioration, spiraling away into endless black and nothing and nothing.

She was dead, he knew, but everything was still ahead of them.

The gravitational pull of the earth had ceased. War had frozen in an imposed paralysis. Omniscience took the universe and twisted backward, unwinding, undoing, erasing. Everything scrambled into reverse like a giant breath blowing a pinwheel backward.

Everything is still ahead of us, Eren thought.

Time shrank.

Time reverted.

By two years, three years, four, Eren inverted—

Dark eyes, living now, everywhere, pulling him together like pieces of broken material floating in a single drop of liquid. “Eren, listen.” Mikasa spoke quietly to him four years before the end of the world. She took the scarf on her throat. “For wrapping this scarf around me,” she said, “thank you.” Her uplifted face softened and she came to him in a way she had never come to him before. Eren leaned in too, older than time itself, having seen the end, the beginning, the end.

In the terrible quake of war, the interval between life and death, he whispered back to her and caught her by the arch in her spine, her rib bones spreading like wings. Pressing his ear to her chest, he listened.

The valves of her heart opened and closed, opened and closed.

“That scarf, I’ll wrap it around you as many times as you want.” Even when I’m dead, even after I’m dead.

_now and forever and for all time, for the rest of eternity—_

Time jumped.

Once more, the nothing passed under Eren’s feet, going, moving, one foot after another and that faint sourceless light, enough to travel by. He walked until his shoes rubbed down into knobs and he found her, the same as he knew she would be, the curve of her back and the wings of her shoulders.

“Does it give you peace to take away my peace?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“So . . . there’s no other way.”

“No.”

“Then, by my hand, it will be ended.”

The water beads shimmered on her skin like ancient rain. The bone-arches of her upper body expanded and fell in a silent mournful repetition. He watched her shudder like from a dead winter cold. But it wasn’t cold or warm, or anything at all.

Eren dropped through the ground. 

Shiganshina appeared and broke open, and Eren spilled through the time-gash, born into an instant. The beginning. The end. Here. Nowhere.

The Cart titan fired her cannon and it shot across the town to tear through Zeke Jaeger and into the Attack Titan. At the point of blood-contact, the inaccessible power, latent in Eren, roared to life and in a bolt of lightning, he saw the future. The holes of his almost-omniscient memory filled.

This part, as it went, was not all the same.

War stopped, the world stopped, and the scarf which he’d known where to find he found wrapped around the young girl, as he knew it would be, because he saw her with it in a different time. And he took it and the world melted away and his feet melted onto sand and the sky filled with the thundering tree of the sum of all realities and time. Here, he was not alone. He’d brought her with him.

“Eren.” Mikasa walked over, silent on the sand. “What’s happening? What have you done?”

“It’s over, Mikasa.” He held the scarf draped across his upturned palms, showing her that it was done. Her hands lifted to her bare throat.

Then he closed the distance and wafted the scarf around her neck and wound it neatly. She watched him the whole time with those dark eyes of ten years ago, of a hundred years ago, a thousand. “Hey,” he said, and neatly fastened the scarf, and his eyes were significant and mournful and sweet and softer than they’d ever been, “will you remember me?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I guess you don’t have a choice.” He leaned his forehead against her forehead. And tried. And couldn’t. “I don’t have the power to change your memories, after all.”

“My memories?” She didn’t understand, but the pain was already beginning. She took him by the head. Her wrists framed his face and long hair. She’d known him since she was a girl. Now she was running out of time. Quickly, quickly: “Eren. There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, but he was already out of time and he was wrong about waiting as long as she needed, until she was ready. And he tried. And couldn’t. “About what you are to me. The truth is, I—”

_What will your reply be?_ Zeke had asked him when he was still alive.

“What are you talking about? I only have four years to—”

Everything was moving.

Unseen trees full of leaves and branches murmured with wind and the calf-length grass flowed and rolled. The wind itself made no sound, but filled everything else in the world with it. White flaps of endless white linen fluttered and snapped, clipped to endless clothes lines. Mikasa tossed one curtain aside, buoyed as she moved through the endless countless lines, dreamily, laughing, trying to find something, dreaming with sunshine, everything bright in the shimmer of laughing and dreaming and playing, searching for something, moving her arms to toss sheets of linen aside, one after another, only to find more sheets of linen, laughing, never disappointed when she didn’t find anything because it was all a part of the children’s game they were playing.

A whipping white linen sheet suddenly flattened and clung, taking shape, outlining the frame of a man. The linen folded around the shape, still snapping and whipping around long arms and long legs. He slipped aside. The white linen rushed off Eren, ripping from the clothes line, singing in the breeze, flying away. Now it was Eren’s white button-up shirt flapping and fluttering around his wrists, his white linen pants flapping and fluttering around his ankles.

Mikasa moved toward him, wearing a white linen dress that flapped and fluttered too, around her long pretty legs. So delicate. It was almost like she wore nothing at all besides the scarf around her neck. They lost sight of each other in the seas of bubbly champagne-linen, the wind and whipping fabric allowing only fleeting glimpses of each other, them smiling between glimpses, hiding and seeking. They were blown forward, closer together by the wind, the conspiracies of time and history and childhood memories, and his arms reached open and she wafted into them like smoke, with everything still moving, the unseen trees murmuring, the grass flowing, and the linen flapping in pure white. Her arms flung around his neck, their hair blowing around, their faces sweetly shimmering, mirror and bright reflections, drops of silver and magic in their eyes, everything floating and flying, very very alive. Then she leaned up to bring her lips to his in all the sweetness and gentleness and infinite history, forward.

“Mikasa,” he said, holding her at last. “Thank you for freeing me.”

“Did you finally find your peace?” she said, smiling, happy for him, putting her fingers all in his hair, loving him always, even long after he was dead. He felt her sweet gentle breath wash over his face. But it wasn’t her. It was only the wind.

“Yeah,” he said. Then he looked at her precious smiling face and began to cry. 

As long as you live, you’ll be the one to remember. Right?

**Author's Note:**

> like usual, i've written something confusing. 
> 
> explanation: in order to end the titan curse, eren has to be a sacrificial lamb and he asks mikasa to be the one to slaughter him. she refuses and then is killed in battle. so he returns to the past and asks again. she agrees and eren is sent back to shiganshina and he retrieves the scarf. before mikasa does as eren has asked, he puts the scarf on her and erases himself from the minds of the Eldians, but obviously this doesn't work on the ackermans. Then in the afterlife, eren has a heaven where he's living a peaceful life with mikasa but he knows she's not real. so maybe it's not heaven. it's some version of hell...


End file.
